July 23, 2008

What Keeps Me Going

i'm working on some grant reports and had to document any press that my film pilgrimage got and i came up on this write-up in the bay city news. reason for this post is not the article but the comment that someone left on the website. check this shit out:
Comments from Examiner Readers
2:10 PM MST on Thu., Jan. 17, 2008 re: "U.C. student's film screens at Sundance"
M.S. Jackson said:
While it is not pretty that this happened to Japanese Americans there is no question that that comnmunity was very insular (and still is)and mysterious and Japanese during a period when their country of origin was as truly evil as Nazi Germany. Also, there were pleanty of legitimate spies within the Japanese American community so it was not a 100 percent unfounded paranoia, especially when considering the full scale war between Jaopan and USA at the time. It would be easier to swallow this tripe if a Japanese American would do a documentary on the mass murder that is as much their heritage as the mild suffering in the internment camps. Using the term concentration camp is a cheap and illicit attempt to cash in on the real suffering and death that Japan (and Germany)rained on their victims. In any event, I would have thought Japanese Americans would have percieved themselves as too superior for self pity.
wow! i've always thought that most people who leave comments on websites, especially youtube, (or call into talk radio stations) got problems and this only proves my point. but at the same time i think its good for us to read this shit once in a while cause it keeps us grounded and reminds us why we do what we do. i think the biggest wake-up call i ever got was when someone left a hate message for my dad when i was an undergrad at ucla. some muafucka straight up said "nakamura you jap, you're gonna get it!". ahhh america!
-the mysterious evil one

2 comments:

That comment is a great example of how Asian Americans in this country have always been looked at as "foreigners" and not accepted as Americans. That person justified the imprisonment of Japanese AMERICANS because of the actions of JAPAN, just like the American government did then and does now (ie, Guantanamo Bay). Ridick.

good looks k.cheddar, your definitely on-point! what's really scary about the comment is that it's filled with rhetoric that justifies current-day military occupation and immigrant bashing. words like "mysterious", "truly evil", "the real suffering", "self-pity", are straight out of fox news type shit.

the crazy thing also is that at the bottom of the comment it says that "42 agree and 39 disagree"! i'm also wondering and wouldn't be surprised if M.S. Jackson is a person of color. and i'm sure that a lot of the 42 people who agree can also be POC's. we talk about this a lot and we definitely need people on both fronts but my ass is gonna prioritize POC's as my target audience first.